[Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is an atrocity. So was
Hamas’s massacre of civilians—and anyone who claims to be on the
left should say so.]
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THE CATASTROPHIC MORAL FAILING OF THOSE WHO WON’T CONDEMN HAMAS  
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Sasha Abramsky
October 12, 2023
The Nation
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_ Israel’s oppression of Palestinians is an atrocity. So was
Hamas’s massacre of civilians—and anyone who claims to be on the
left should say so. _

Israeli soldiers stand next to the bodies of Israelis killed by Hamas
fighters in kibbutz Kfar Aza, Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Al Jazeera

 

If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you
now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of
horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this
past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who
fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced
in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective
punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by
Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.

I write days after Hamas launched the bloodiest attacks against Israel
in decades. In the space of a single day of killing, more Israelis
died than have died in any conflict since the 1973 Yom Kippur
war—and while the dead of that war were, in the main, soldiers, the
roughly 1,200 dead this past week were mostly civilians, including
nearly 300 revelers at a music festival, residents of kibbutzes, and
an unfathomable number of children. Whether or not the media accounts
suggesting that Hamas went out of its way to target young people,
children, and babies are accurate, it seems indisputable that its
gunmen went from house to house executing as many people as they
could, as fast as they could. What is indisputable as well is that
Hamas’s hitmen, in addition to killing as many people as possible,
also went on a hostage-taking spree. Kidnap victims are thought to
include Vivian Silver
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a 74-year-old who has spent decades working to build bonds of peace
between Israelis and Palestinians.

Many progressives have, quite rightly, been quick to condemn Hamas’s
actions, and they have written eloquently, and with nuance, about the
horrors inflicted on both the Israeli and Palestinian populations by
this week’s orgy of bloodletting. A powerful example here is the
Palestinian writer Karim Kattan, in the French newspaper _Le Monde_
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writing_ _about the tragic circle of heartbreak being drawn in the
region, mourning the casualties on all sides. “A dead man is 10
people, a family, a village, mourning and shattered,” he writes.
“A wounded person is often a mutilated body.” Others on the
“left,” however, appear to be celebrating the massacre as a master
class in liberation politics, as just comeuppance for decades of
cruel, violent, and degrading actions committed by Israel against its
Palestinian population.

Just today, _The Nation_ published a truly extraordinary, bilious
glorification
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the Hamas action, written by Saree Makdisi, in which a pro forma
half-sentence statement of regret at civilian casualties was followed
by thousands of words praising the broader strategy, actions, and
results, of the Hamas attacks. It is beyond me how this was deemed a
piece worthy of publication in a magazine with such a storied history
of shaping progressive values and agendas in America over more than a
century of publication.

BLMChicago [[link removed]],
which has more than 50,000 Twitter followers, tweeted out an
extraordinarily inflammatory meme within minutes of the news that
Hamas gunmen had paraglided into a music festival in southern Israel
and executed hundreds of people. The tweet showed an image of a
paratrooper descending to the ground, and the slogan “I stand with
Palestine.” Now explain to me how, in good conscience, one can build
a movement to oppose police brutality and racism in one country and,
at the same time, glory in the killing of 1,200 people, mostly
civilians, in another?

Yes, Israel’s policies are often spectacularly vicious. Yes,
Netanyahu’s foul far-right government has taken that viciousness and
that bigotry to new levels. Yes, that government, with its
pseudo-fascist oratory and its deliberately confrontational
no-compromise policies, has pushed the Palestinian population beyond
the point of endurance. One only has to look at the actions and
statements of many current cabinet ministers to see that this is a
government that thrives in a petri dish of extremism and
fanaticism—as many Israelis were all too aware in the months leading
up to the Hamas rampage, which is why the streets of Israel’s major
cities have been jam-packed with anti-Netanyahu protesters since the
formation of his new government.

In “normal” times, Netanyahu’s government has embraced the most
authoritarian of policies. Now, in a genuine emergency, it will likely
push the limits even further. Its leaders have, in the last few days,
seemingly decided to raze large parts of Gaza in response to the Hamas
outrage. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has, inexcusably, called
Palestinians “human animals,” apparently using this dehumanizing
language as a rationale for the blitzkrieg ordered against the
besieged enclave. Days into Israel’s response, the images out of
Gaza look like Grozny after the Russians razed the city. If Israel’s
leadership goes down a path of collective punishment, as it seems to
be doing, people of good conscience must of course denounce this.

But, in the same way that Israeli assassinations and indiscriminate
bombings of civilian populations and infrastructure deserve
condemnation, in the same way that efforts to displace the West
Bank’s population via the building of new settlements deserve
condemnation, so too the extremism, the zealotry, the fanatical vision
of Hamas also merit unreserved calumny rather than praise. And that,
for one particularly morally myopic part of the left in the United
States, in the United Kingdom, and in many other Western countries, is
apparently a bridge too far.

 

At Harvard
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the day that Hamas killed more than 1,000 people, a coalition of
pro-Palestinian students released a statement reading, in part, “The
Apartheid regime is the only one to blame.” All well and good to
condemn the manifest horrors of Israeli practices vis-à-vis the
occupied territories, but nowhere in the four-paragraph statement was
there a single word of sympathy for the victims or condemnation of the
Hamas killers. Meanwhile, that same day, a pro-Palestinian protester
in Paris was quoted as saying, “We are all witnessing incredible
actions by the Palestinian armed resistance, who, as far as we know,
manage to come out of this huge concentration camp that Gaza is and
inflict severe losses to the Israeli soldiers and settlers. We are
looking at the news every minute.” In the UK, a headmaster at a
Jewish school
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his students permission to not wear their uniforms, so that they would
be less identifiable to hoodlums glorying in the moment and looking to
beat Jews up.

A DSA-promoted pro-Palestine rally in New York City degenerated into
clear anti-Semitism
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a celebration of the slaughter, as Representative Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez was quick to point out. It was, she rightly noted, an
exercise in “bigotry and callousness.” So-called “Solidarity
statements” released this week by other DSA chapters also referenced
a “right to resist” and clearly implied that the bloodshed was a
legitimate form of resistance. The Las Vegas DSA put out a series of
tweets
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the full blame for the massacre on Israel and America; its authors
couldn’t even muster a few words of condolence for the hundreds of
murder victims. PBS quoted
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protesters saying that “when Palestine rises in resistance, the
diaspora rises with it.” Again, not a word of remorse or grief for
the staggering number of civilians shot dead in cold blood.

Similar statements, issued by small-but-loud activist groups at
Stanford, Columbia, Yale, and other top universities, spoke of a
“counteroffensive” having been launched against the
“settler-colonial oppressor,” declared that “the illusion of
Israel is burning,” and concluded that “Israel bears full
responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” I doubt very much
whether most students at these institutions, be they conservative,
liberal, or socialist, would agree with such a morally calamitous read
of the mass slaughter, but the fact that some supposedly progressive
student groups would lean into such thinking is indicative of a
tremendous moral double standard on their part.

Surely, all of this isn’t what passes for the moral voice of
conscience on the left today. Surely, Stalin and his reign ought to
have been enough to forever wean the left off of the specious argument
that the means—no matter how vile—are justified by the noble ends.
Surely, going door to door shooting children in cold blood, gunning
down unarmed revelers at a music festival, taking dozens of families
hostage, and killing infants doesn’t constitute a “legitimate”
right to self-determination, nor does it constitute “fighting” by
any meaningful definition of the word.

The romanticization of Hamas’s killing spree by one small subsection
of the left, the argument that the shedding of innocent blood is
somehow forced on the killers by their victims, is the same one that
far-right murderers, such as Anders Beivik or Dylann Roof, have been
making these past several years before they open fire with their
high-velocity rifles and spray supermarkets, schools, music festivals,
churches, synagogues, and mosques with their murderous ammunition.

A small, but loud, part of the left is falling for the logical fallacy
that simply because Hamas opposes the awful, frequently murderous,
actions of the Israeli government, therefore Hamas and its ideology
are to be considered friends of a progressive, secular, vision. To be
clear, there’s _literally nothing_ progressive about Hamas: It is
a fundamentalist movement that views indiscriminate killing as an end
in itself. It has no interest in a negotiated settlement with
Israel—even if the Israeli government wanted to negotiate, which,
especially in its current far-right incarnation, it generally
doesn’t—viewing the complete eradication of Israel as the only
acceptable goal. And it frequently turns its murderous gaze inward on
political opponents and marginalized groupings within Gaza
itself. _Haaretz_ has reported that members of the LGBTQ community
in Gaza risk being killed
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of their sexual identity. In 2009, _The Guardian_ reported
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Hamas enforcers had begun patrolling beaches to ensure that women wore
conservative clothes. Their patrols aren’t that different from those
of the infamous “morality police” in Iran. Four years later, the
movement segregated all schools in Gaza by gender
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It hangs residents it views as traitors
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and its fighters are also alleged to have maimed large numbers of
political opponents
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deliberately shooting them in the legs.

One can and should shout from the rooftops about the horrors of
Israeli actions in the West Bank and in Gaza. One can and should call
out the daily humiliations faced by Palestinian communities kept
walled in and economically strangled by Israeli policy. But one can do
all of these things without then turning around and celebrating the
massacre of civilians, of children, by Hamas this past week.

It’s inconceivable to me that, in any other context except the
Israel-Palestine one, supposedly leftist students, or campaigners
against police brutality, or progressive commentators, people who
pride themselves on their sense of social justice, would celebrate the
mass slaughter of more than 1,000 civilians as an act of
self-determination, self-defense, and resistance. Surely, it’s not
too much to ask for “solidarity groups” to have the moral
imagination and courage and, yes, decency, to at least recognize
wholesale murder when it’s staring them in the face.Sasha Abramsky
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_Sasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for The Nation, is the author
of several books, including Inside Obama’s Brain, The American
Way of Poverty, The House of 20,000 Books
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at Shadows, and, most recently, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of
Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports Superstar. Subscribe to
The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based political
column, here [[link removed]]._

_Copyright c 2023 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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Please support  progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!    _

* Israel
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* Palestinians
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* Hamas
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